Fails the Bechdel test (which was made for movies, but can be applied to books, comics, TV shows, as well). Good to know. I will add it to my mental list.
I wasn’t planning on reading it anyway, but good to know.
Actually, there’s nothing wrong with reading stuff that’s kinda sexist, as long as it’s not overtly misogynous; I mean, there are men who do stuff without women, and boys who have adventures without girls. My son reads Hardy boys books. I read Nancy Drew books. But he also reads things by women authors sometimes, and actually said once that he thought Hermione was a better wizard that Harry, and spent several days pondering why she wasn’t the chosen one, and finally decided it was because she had muggle parents, so she couldn’t have had the transformational experience Harry had, and been “The Girl Who Lived.” It has not yet occurred to him to wonder why Rowling just didn’t make Harry a girl, but I’m not going to ask. I’m going to see if he comes up with it on his own.
Basically, there is no author who isn’t a flawed person. If the book still entertains you, so be it. Most people who read, read enough variety that they get their vegetables, fruit, milk, bread, and all. They don’t just read one author over and over, or even one type of author. A few people do, and do end up with a skewed world view, but you can’t really blame the author.
I may face pitchforks and torches for this, but while Tolkien can create overall creative/interesting stories, the actual prose and dialogue is pretty tedious, stilted and clumsy. I never read the books as a child and only attempted to a couple of years ago. Got around to the point where Bilbo met Golem in The Hobbit before finally giving up on it, decided that the “adult” books may be better written and started the first LoTR book and gave up on that one before they ever left Bag End.
Not about Tolkein, but one thing that always jolts me out of a novel, is when the author uses the same “unusual” word multiple times within a short period. Maybe a lengthy noun or adjective.
Most recently, I was reading Peyton Place. I forget what the word was, but it was used twice in a span of 3 pages, right in the middle of the 370pp book. The sort of thing I always point out to my son when proofing his drafts.
The wretched pathetic creature in Tolkien’s books is “Gollum”, named after the gurgling sound he’s in the habit of making. A “Golem” is a creature from Jewish folklore, an artificial man made from clay and animated by a righteous man (or, in modern fantasy, any artificial man animated by magical means).
My aforementioned literary theory class had us read The Fellowship of the Ring. There was a lot of careful pointing out of the dearth of female characters and the roles they play when they do appear, as well as discussion of racist overtones in the portrayal of villains, especially orcs. But there was also a lot of talk about magical ideas and themes and how they were woven into the text–stuff that I wouldn’t have picked up on without having it explained, and which influenced me mightily.
For those reasons, I found TFotR entertaining. I found the second and third books ridiculously tedious, though.
You don’t need the Bechdel test, or a language analysis, to tell you when a work has no female characters at all. The Bechdel test is helpful in recognizing the more subtle cases where the female characters are marginalized, important only for how they affect and relate to the male characters.
And I don’t think it’s necessarily sexist for a book not to have any female characters. And there’s nothing wrong or harmful in reading such a book, as long as you get the “vitamins” it lacks from other books you read.
Does having no female characters render the book less interesting and less relatable to female readers? I don’t know; that depends on the reader, and I’m not a female. You seem to be saying Yes, for you personally. It occurs to me that The Hobbit also doesn’t have any human characters (strictly speaking) until near the end; and, despite being written for children, doesn’t have any child characters.
Not to me, but then, “female” is to me about as important as “brown-haired” (both being stuff I won in the genetic lottery) until someone else decides it’s important.
The Hobbit is not anything like The Lord of the Rings, but that’s intentional. When Tolkien was starting to write LotR, it started out very Hobbit-like. But, darker things crept in and the tone changed, and Tolkien had to go back and re-write what he’d written originally, and most of that children’s book stuff disappeared. You get some mild sense of it in Chapter 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, “A Long-Expected Party”.
When I was young, I used to get incensed at the idea that Tolkien’s works weren’t absolutely perfect. But after I came to realize exactly why I hated reading most of the works of Dickens, and am totally not into reading stuff by Danielle Steel, I came to realize that not everyone will enjoy a book that lovingly re-creates in words the world in which the action is set. It’s part of why I have difficulty reading the works of Tolkien’s good friend, Clives Staples Lewis. Or, for that matter, most of what Piers Anthony writes. So I’ll forgive Darren Garrison for his heresy.
To be fair, The Hobbit was written in-universe by Bilbo. If it’s true that female Dwarves look just like male Dwarves, then he may have just made the natural assumption that those burly beardy guys were all guys.
I totally think we need to find at least one dwarf who’s never referred to as “he”, or “brother”, or the like, and then start an Internet rumor that that one is totally female, didn’t you catch the clues?.
They’re sexist only in the sense that there are very few female characters. But that’s a reflection of the sort of society and situations they’re set in, and when female characters do show up, they tend to be every bit as competent, independent, and so on as the male characters (or more so).
They’re racist in the sense that most of the adversaries are orcs, and orcs are portrayed as universally evil, while most hobbits, elves, dwarves, etc. are basically good. Little to no thought is given (at least in the novels themselves) to the question of whether orcs have free will, or can ever possibly be good. On the other hand, this is a context where “human” is for most purposes regarded as a single race, and in the one instance where a character does make racist assumptions about a particular human subrace, a wiser and more knowledgeable character is very quick to correct him.
The humans allied with Sauron also tend to be swarthier than the good guys like the Rohirrim. However, there is no evidence that Tolkien believes their race leads to evil, but rather that it’s a result of the geography. And the most savage humans are basically good guys.
Dwarves are also based somewhat on Jews, but not negatively. But from his personal writings, it is clear that Tolkien had a poor opinion of antisemitism and Nazism.
Even though female dwarves are nearly indistinguishable from males, it’s also pointed out they kept relatively cloistered lives. You aren’t going to see female dwarves wondering about in the world, except at great need.
end up on Stephen Colbert’s show. Represent the 'Dope!